But this is just the beginning. Wired.com has a fascinating piece on what’s about to happen to high-speed Internet connections in the U.S.: a jump in throughput to speeds between 50-100 Mbps, many times faster than the 1.5-6 Mpbs that is common now. Wired calls it Broadband 2.0:

Experts say this increased bandwidth — when it becomes widely available — will have a profound effect on everything from our social interactions on the web to the way we consume media.

“The YouTube philosophy is really the primary motivator here,” says Connie Chang-Hasnain, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and expert in broadband communications. “Even grandmas post things on YouTube. But, right now, the resolution is terrible and there are some very predefined limits due to bandwidth.”

All of that will change with 50 Mbps download speeds, she said, and by simply improving the sound and video quality of video streaming sites, you can dramatically change how a society learns, teaches and communicates.

“Basically, people are going to do a lot of the things they normally do today, but in a better, more satisfying, way,” says Crick Waters, co-founder of Ribbit, a Silicon Valley company that sells an internet-based telephony platform.

Waters says that first and foremost, we can expect everything to go high-definition: We’ll download HD movies from Netflix, upload HD content to YouTube, and watch more sophisticated HD content on our televisions. The added bandwidth may even spur development of extra goodies, like stereoscopic 3-D video and high-fidelity audio.

“Believe me, the minute someone puts the pipes out there, people will find a way to use them,” Waters says.

The two companies leading the bandwidth boom, according to Wired writer Brian Gardiner, are Comcast and Verizon. Both have a presence in the Houston area — Comcast is the primary cable TV/Internet provider here, and Verizon is installing FiOS, its fiber-to-the-home Internet service, in newer suburbs, with no current plans to bring it into the city.

For now, the companies’ Broadband 2.0 footprint is small:

While the technologies they use differ, Comcast and Verizon have both started offering ultra-high-bandwidth services to select customers that are as much as 25 times faster than today’s average broadband speed of 4.8 Mbps, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Comcast’s new “extreme high-speed internet service” uses the latest version of cable modem technology, while Verizon’s FiOS service delivers the internet to your home via optical fibers.

Both services are currently available only in relatively limited geographic areas. Earlier this month, Comcast started offering a service to some Minneapolis/St. Paul residents that features download speeds of 50 Mbps for a hefty $150 a month. During his CES keynote in January, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said his company plans to expand this new service in 20 percent of the area it serves by the end of the year, as well as offer speeds in excess of 100 Mbps in two years.

Verizon’s FiOS has a yearlong head start on Comcast’s service, and Verizon currently offers it in parts of 17 states. Verizon said it will offer its fiber-to-the-home services to more than 18 million people — half of the geographic area it now serves — by 2010.

The Wired piece makes the point that people who are willing to pay for this kind of bandwidth will expect services that make the price tag worthwhile. And those services may not exist until there’s a critical mass of users in place. After all, the current state of online video didn’t exist until high-speed Internet connections became the rule rather than the exception.

What will need to happen is for the cost of Broadband 2.0 to drop dramatically. Comcast’s $150 for 50 Mbps is a ridiculous price, catering right now only to a very small market that’s not representative of the demand that’s really out there. Hopefully by the time it rolls into Houston, it’ll be more reasonable.

I think we can only dream about the kinds of services that might spring up if the majority of folks had 50-Mbps Internet access. Video is just one part of the equation.

I just dream of the day when we have faster upload speeds. I know they throttle it out of concern that we are all pirating music and movies, but really? I just want to be able to upload my photos to share at speeds that are reasonable.

Downloading right now isn’t that bad – although faster would definitely be wonderful. My Apple TV could get the HD movie rentals instantly. Oh, and maybe my HD cable wouldn’t break up and become pixelated all the time then. You are right – it would change the way we all use the internet, just like broadband did a few years ago.

I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon out our way, we use an expensive DSL provided by a telephone cooperative but as someone brought up, what would my typical download speed really be? I mean, if I download a new Acrobat reader or a Windows update I’ll see that download come in at a few kilobits per second even though my tested downstream speed is (you can snicker now) 322K. I feel cheated.

Right now my world is wireless WiFi rather than wired. I’d be limited to WiFi speeds unless I start running wires. I don’t ever connect directly to the cable modem with Ethernet unless there is some huge download (very rare). I’d have to do some serious head scratching and rethink priorities.

One thing that comes to mind would be Time Machine type backups over the Internet enabling easier off-site backups.

If the upload speeds aren’t severely throttled, I would probably move my web server back to the house, for starters. I could also see an AppleTV (or similar) device in my future – networked to the different TVs.

Yep – I could also stand to put my photo archives online, where I could get to them from wherever I happened to be.

I did not suffer really. I can see the business applications, but not really consumer applications of it (except VR and possibly HD and videogaming and probably 3-d virtual houseguests. But these things seem more dependent on display technologies than PCs.

I don’t think the price is “ridiculous”, but it would eat my landline communications budget. I would expect to be able to kill my cable television and phone lines, bringing everything in via IP. I would expect it to be hassle-free and just a pipe, no Microsoft only services (as in techs that aren’t taught to hang up on you when you mention you’re connecting with something other than Windows). At that price, the service had better be really good. If I didn’t get 99.9% uptime, their tech support people and I would get to a first-name-relationship in short order.

Broadband is a service, and I don’t think you can think of it in terms of “dollars per Mbps”. It’s what the market will bear, and the market won’t bear a 3-digit figure. It certainly won’t fly as a consumer service price, not when consumers also have to pay for TV, phone, etc.

Just repeating my old mantra: Comcast needs a local cable ISP competitor if we are to see truly competitive prices, real incentive to continually upgrade their network and relief from the desire to throttle certain services.

150 mbps is nice. I wouldn’t mind having it. Maybe then I could truly enjoy all the entertainment available for download or through streaming. Unfortunately, if Comcast can focuses support on the average user and views large bandwidth users as a threat, what real use is 150 type speeds? It may be nice that my webpage arrives in a fraction of the blink of an eye it does now, but slightly faster webpage loads aren’t worth the three fold increase in cost. Faster speeds mean I’ll download more and I already flirt with Comcasts limits.

What real advantage do I get for the bucks other than just faster downloads if I my bandwidth is still limited?

My current view regarding Comcast is that present prices are much too high and speeds are too slow. Cut the prices in half and quadruple the speed and I’ll begin thinking more positively about Comcast.